He'd run through his current mission parameters twice. Reviewed the NATO briefing notes in his head. Mentally reorganized the next two weeks into manageable segments—hospital visits, his father's schedule, his own PT routine to maintain while stateside.
His brain had run out of things to work through at 0200.
And then it wandered.
It started with the handshake.
That was the part he couldn’t logic his way out of—that it had ended with a handshake, professional and clean, like three months had meant nothing. Like Hale hadn’t kissed him the night before with something that felt uncomfortably close to desperation. Elliot had shaken his hand, said something appropriate and walked in the opposite direction, telling himself that was the right call. The only call.
Elliot would never be able to give Hale what he deserved. There was no room in his life for something like that.
What he hadn’t anticipated was the specific quality of the absence. Not grief exactly—Elliot didn’t have much experience with grief. More like a miscalculation. He’d run the numbers wrong somewhere, had underestimated what it would cost to walk away from the one person who’d never looked at him like he was a legacy. A name to leverage.
Elliot’s throat tightened. He lay completely still and waited for it to pass.
It held longer than expected.
He reached for his phone on the nightstand. Studied it for a minute. Put it back down.
He had a 0700 hospital visit and a father who noticed everything.
Elliot closed his eyes and went back to the NATO briefing notes in his head.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ELLIOT
Three years after Selection
Elliot’s phonebuzzed against his thigh.
It was Wednesday afternoon, two days before Reed’s wedding. Elliot sat in a briefing that should’ve had his full attention. Colonel Marsh droned through an assessment of their last field exercise, picking it apart slide by slide.
It buzzed again. He ignored it. Checking your phone during a briefing earned you extra duty.
Elliot kept his eyes forward, posture perfect, hands folded on the table in front of him. Around him, fifteen other officers sat in similar positions, all of them pretending to care deeply about supply chain logistics.
Third buzz.
Someone had either died or Reed was spiraling over wedding logistics. Given that Reed had fired off four panicked texts last week about whether navy blue or charcoal gray worked better on Elliot and the other groomsmen, Elliot’s money landed firmly on the latter.
The briefing ended. Elliot gathered his papers andheaded for the hallway, phone already out before he cleared the conference room door.
Three messages from Reed.
Reed:so don’t freak out
Reed:actually you're definitely going to freak out
Reed:Hudson's coming to the wedding. don't kill me. bye
Elliot stopped walking.
People flowed around him in the corridor. Officers heading to their next meeting, enlisted personnel moving with purpose. Elliot remained perfectly still in the middle of it all, staring at his phone.
Hale was coming to the wedding after all.
Hale, who Elliot had very consciously not thought about in years—give or take a few late-night exceptions. In fact, he had successfully compartmentalized Hale into a box labeled "Selection" and shoved it so far back in his memory that he could almost pretend it had never happened.
